The AMS Must Justify Its Support of the NSA
Posted by Tom Leinster
That’s the title of a letter I’ve just had published in the Notices of the AMS (Feb 2015, out yesterday). Text follows. There’s also a related letter from Daniel Stroock of MIT.
Plus, there’s an article by the NSA’s director of research, Michael Wertheimer. I have a few points to make about that — read on.
Here’s my letter, together with links to supporting evidence:
The AMS must justify its support of the NSA
Roger Schlafly (letters, November 2014) accuses mathematicians of an “overwrought” and “over-excited” response to the recently-revealed activities of the National Security Agency (NSA). So, let us look at some cold facts. In 2011, the NSA explicitly stated its goal of universal surveillance, describing its “posture” as “collect it all”, “know it all”, “exploit it all”. The same year, the NSA’s close British partner GCHQ said it was intercepting over 50 billion communication events per day. In 2012, a single NSA program celebrated its trillionth metadata record.
On encryption: the NSA’s 2013 budget request sought funds to “Insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems”. The NSA described its secret program Sentry Raven as “work[ing] with specific US commercial entities … to modify US manufactured encryption systems to make them exploitable for SIGINT [signals intelligence]”. The aim is clear: that no two human beings shall be able to communicate digitally without the NSA being able to listen.
Schlafly is, at least, correct in noting that outrage at the intelligence agencies’ abuse of surveillance powers is nothing new: from the FBI’s bugging of Martin Luther King and subsequent attempt to blackmail him into suicide, to the 2011 extrajudicial killing of an American child by CIA drone strike (a program to which the NSA supplies surveillance data). He is justified in worrying about the data held by Google, Facebook, etc., but he writes as if concern over that and state surveillance were mutually exclusive, which of course they are not; and much of that data is harvested by the NSA’s PRISM program anyway.
Further, his comparison with 1970s technology distracts from the awesome invasive power of today’s internet. As the NSA’s former general counsel Stewart Baker said, “metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life”. Former NSA director Michael Hayden agreed, adding “we kill people based on metadata”.
By collaborating with the NSA, the AMS sends a strong political message: that it is proud to support the NSA’s work and welcomes it into the mathematical community. It is just as surely a political position as withdrawing cooperation would be. Many members are vigorously opposed to much of what the NSA does; indeed, when the Notices set out to organize the series “Mathematicians discuss the Snowden revelations”, its editors could not find anyone to write in the NSA’s defense. (And when they finally did, it was a longtime NSA employee.)
How does the AMS leadership justify its continued cooperation with the NSA? Is it certain it has the backing of the membership? And what exactly would the NSA have to do in order for the AMS to declare “Enough: this partnership brings mathematicians into disrepute”?
Tom Leinster, University of Edinburgh
Now some brief points in response to the article by Michael Wertheimer, NSA’s director of research:
Wertheimer writes for a full three pages, mostly about the cryptographic algorithm known as the Dual Elliptic Curve pseudorandom number generator, which many experts believe contain a back door or trapdoor inserted by the NSA. He does everything to make the NSA’s behaviour sound reasonable.
However, one thing he does not do, anywhere in this long defence, is deny that the NSA did insert a back door. Why not?
Wertheimer says the NSA is “committed to the important work of [industrial standards] groups in producing secure cryptographic standards that protect global communications” and speaks of the “work NSA has done to promote secure standards”. Maybe so, but the NSA’s own internal documents state explicitly that they are also committed to undermining the security of encryption systems.
He denies that the NSA has an “agenda to ‘undermine Internet encryption’”. But multiple public statements by leading figures in the NSA and allied intelligence agencies make totally explicit their opposition to effective internet encryption. In the last few months alone, we’ve heard this from the head of the FBI (“encryption threatens to lead us all to a very, very dark place”), the NSA’s former head lawyer, and the head of GCHQ. Going back further, in the 1990s “crypto wars”, the NSA and FBI tried to persuade the Clinton government to adopt the Clipper chip, an encryption device with a back door purposely built in. (Ross Anderson’s fabulously readable book Security Engineering, free online, has an account of this in section 24.3.9.)
Like many of these articles by mathematicians employed by the intelligence agencies, it very politely suggests that none of the rest of us know what we’re talking about: “I further hope that dialogue on important issues will always be … informed”. Doubtless Wertheimer knows much about the NSA that we do not. It’s a secret agency; that’s inevitable. And yet like all of these articles, it does not engage with one single fact that we have learned from by far the largest body of publicly-available documentation on recent NSA activities: the Snowden archive.
Mathematicians like facts. NSA and GCHQ mathematicians who do not engage with the known facts are unlikely to be found convincing.
Wertheimer finishes by fondly recalling the “warm embrace” the NSA gave him as a student, and by noting the extent to which the NSA has woven itself into American mathematical culture: “Our research mathematicians serve on editorial boards, publish papers, teach at universities, and contribute time and energy to the AMS”. He portrays himself and his colleagues as decent human beings, acting “quietly and honorably”.
I have little doubt that many NSA/GCHQ mathematicians do regard themselves that way (although I also know that some were uncomfortable enough with what the agencies were doing that they quit, even pre-Snowden). But as I wrote here and here, you can’t place much weight on people’s positive self-regard. (Mark Meckes very pertinently mentioned the Milgram experiments.) Almost everyone has a need to view their own actions as noble and right, even if this is obviously contradicted by the evidence. The fact that a group of people regard themselves positively means almost nothing. It’s their actions that matter.
Re: The AMS Must Justify Its Support of the NSA
It’s easy to answer why the AMS supports the NSA. Many of its most influential members are corrupted by their direct and indirect ties to the state security apparatus in the USA. As an undergraduate at Harvard a substantial number of my classmates took summer jobs in the NSA. When later those same people win Fields Medals and other prizes and gain considerable influence, those summer jobs are well compensated for their old employer. It’s no accident that the IDA is in Princeton. Let’s stop being nice and pretending that no one’s hands are bloody.